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By Max Greenberg

George Will

The same week a major report found that global warming is both unequivocal and “extremely likely” to be manmade, Fox News announced that it has hired longtime Washington Post columnist George Will, who has helped cultivate a “climate of doubt” about the issue, as a commentator and analyst.

Will is expected to be a featured analyst on programs including Special Report with Bret Baier and Fox News Sunday after more than 30 years as a regular panelist on ABC’s This Week. This provides another prominent platform for a man whose opinions already appear in The Washington Post and hundreds of other newspapers.

Will has often used these platforms to regurgitate common misleading claims from those who deny climate change and grossly distort climate data. In a 2009 column, Will claimed that global sea ice levels were unchanged from 1979, citing the Arctic Climate Research Center. That center responded that this was a “disturbing” misstatement, as its data showed a decline in sea ice “roughly equal to the area of Texas, California and Oklahoma combined.” The Post‘s ombudsman eventually criticized the fact-checking process that had led to the error.

Recently, Will cherry-picked a year with record wildfires in an attempt to deny the trend toward larger and longer-duration U.S. wildfires. That claim found its way to Fox News within days despite the extensive research showing that, as the U.S. Global Change Research Program has explained, “wildfires in the U.S. are already increasing due to warming.”

Will’s repeated promotion of climate misinformation has led the late Los Angeles Times editorial writer Dan Turner to pronounce the columnist’s misunderstanding of some elements of climate change “mystifying,” and a Discover Magazine columnist to write that Will is “helping to muddle our collective scientific literacy.”

This climate misinformation will likely find a welcome home at Fox News, which has frequently come under fire for sowing doubt about the veracity of climate change and focusing on purported “scandals” rather than the scientific consensus. One study found that Fox News viewers were “significantly more likely” to be misinformed about the scientific consensus on climate change due to such coverage, which often creates confusion under the guise of “balance.” Similarly, a 2012 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that coverage of climate science by Fox News, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, has been “overwhelmingly misleading,” despite Murdoch’s 2007 pledge that his media outlets would treat manmade climate change as “a fact.”

Visit EcoWatch’s CLIMATE CHANGE page for more related news on this topic.

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Comments

Silver Eagle

Typical of fox. Spewing bull shit for the idiots who waste their time watching their drivel.

Jim Young

We used to listen to George Will, a for a few decades. He used to sound responsible, with fewer “cherry picked” evidence taken so far out of context (at least to my unsophisticated views). Then we noticed the results of what he provided cover for were worse than what he was criticizing, and far more dangerous to our economy.

Another commenter advised that if, in a poker game, you haven’t figured out who the sucker is within the first 15 minutes, then you are the sucker. That pretty much explains how I feel about George Will (though it took me very much longer than 15 minutes).

Fool me once…

Wildnwooley

Will is not a dummy. Fox must be paying him plenty to shill for their distortions.